I don't know. I went to school in Las Cruces (NMSU) and Dona Ana county is pretty damn poor other than those associated with either the Uni or White Sands. At the time (~1994) they were just starting to talk about a space port. For them to be willing to take a chance on something like this through a self imposed sales tax increase is commendable. The at least partial funding from the local tax base will keep local oversight fairly high. Granted it is construction so by default its corrupt, but I've seen how the areas has transformed since the early 90s and its impressive. I think it has been money very well spent and as long as it totally doesn't fall through will be a huge boom economically for the area. They've probably doubled the number of Sonics and Weinerschniztles(sp?) in town since I was there and anyone can a test to that being the true measure for economic strength for a town in the southwest.
The local tax district isn't supposed to carry the place, it's just supposed to show willingness of the locals, and later when there's significant tourist travel, THEN they'll be able to contribute more. For now it was enough to get it started so NM would fund the majority of the construction. It's a speculative investment by the state, which hopes to see returns if things work out.
I'm I missing something or does this spaceport not actually connect to anything? Ironically you would be travelling the most distance in your life and end not going anywhere. Anyway, hope this will bring actual space travel to the moon, planets, I would even settle for a station on Earth orbit, closer to most people.
You're not wrong. Just like SS1, SS2/Virgin Galactic is strictly an up-and-down same place ride. SS2 is not capable of an orbital trajectory or even significant gliding distance, by design. SS3 is intended to be orbital. Then we'll be going places.
"He claims he needed to do this because he was unable to track them down to a physical address."
He's not necessarily supposed to be able to. That what they hire investigators for, and process servers to deliver them. My money says he just wanted to keep as much of his money as he could.
The usual excuses will now be compounded with the excuses familiar to anyone who's been on line for long: "I downloaded it with my email, but it got corrupted." "My hard drive crashed" "Someone hacked into my computer/account and" [deleted it/I thought they faked it/they put that page up, that was never me to begin with/etc.] "I haven't used that account for X amount of time" "My hard drive crashed" (yes, that gets used enough to bear repeating) "You must have sent it to the wrong account because I never saw it" "It was in some format I couldn't read; I only use FooBar format".
Anyone who really wants to avoid it will make sure one or more of those are true when it comes to telling the court why they didn't respond, and very few will be available that will be able to prove otherwise.
Forget diving for it individually. Let OSF collect and collate, and task someone at/. with gathering and posting a weekly summary. It'd certainly serve a better purpose than "Ignore Mail". It'd bolster OSF's effort because, get serious now, which is going to be read more?
Lorenz 'discovered' chaos when he found non-linear, self-similar but non-replicating, and increasingly unpredictable results coming from a set of three interdependent (each variable was a term in the other two) recursive LINEAR equations.
You've got humans in this equation. They are not only not linear, they're not even rational.
The "beauty" in John Nash's "A Beautiful Mind" is best typified early in the movie when he tells his fellows that if everyone goes after the brunettes, they'll all get laid, but if any one of the goes after the blond, none of them will. That became the essence of his most famous works in game theory. Granted "This man is a genius." (the sum total of the recommendation letter his Carnegie mentor penned to Princeton), but through many trials and errors you'd expect others to come to similar results, knowingly or not. But NOOOO everyone wants the blond, even though the intended result is not affected by hair color. The decision making process if very often not controlled by the frontal lobes.
I'm speaking from history, metaphor and a male perspective here. I don't defend it, nor do I hold up for contempt. It's just that I can only speak from the male perspective. I suspect females have equally irrational perspectives they can speak from (though they may be more likely to have more sense than to do so).
CAN-SPAM like many other laws (can anyone say PATRIOT?) was written and passed for the benefit of voters and those they vote for. Very few cases of enforcement were actual attempts to enforce the law, most were attempts to fill press releases.
As I've quoted before, FTC Commissioner Orson Swindell said at the first FTC spam conference "What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." Certainly in spirit, yes. If the Secret Service can round of a few dozen kids and a game designer and cause them all manner of grief, now that they know what they're doing, why can't they round up a few dozen spammers? Why do the "spam kings" get removed only to be replaced with no net (pun unintentional, but I like it) effect?
Isn't there an "or cause to" statement in the law? Those that hire spammers were supposed to be held accountable too. "I didn't know they would spam it" should only be taken to mean the owner was negligent in research and contract. Negligence isn't commission, but it's still a basis for guilt.
Spamming has become such a big multinational business, and increasingly associated with organized crime, it's only a matter of time before we start hearing about them offing each other and/or their providers. That's hearing about it, not to say it hasn't happened already and not recognized.
"The stock of Ichi Ban Tuna Ice Cream hit a new high following analysis of data from their eye-tracking billboards, showing dozens of people were looking at them for extended periods. Substantial investment was made in creating more manufacturing and distribution facilities. However, the stock then plummeted when it was found that the data represented dozens of Hello Kitty dolls being propped up in front of many of the billboards. The earlier investment was written off as a corporate loss. The corporate officers are said to be re-evaluating use of the technology. Hello Kitty had no comment."
Social solutions are the best solutions to technical problems, because you can't work around society, something most technical people aren't trained to grasp.
They use the law to suit them and ignore it when that suits them, hoping to get away with questionable tactics in both cases.
It's time to seize the whole outfit, and their "hired" investigation company (my money says it's a spin off, or has been bought in majority after the fact), determine how much of what they're doing illegally they knew was illegal, prosecute, dissolve, and distribute the sold assets among the victims.
And the 'subscriber' companies (ie. those who formed and own the RIAA) shouldn't get off free either. Corporation as artificial entities serve to protect its members from direct prosecution. Fine. Put the artificial entity in artificial jail (receivership), force the subscribers to maintain their relationship, and let them suffer the consequences proportionally to the extent they 'subscribe'.
When the law says "or caused to" second parties can be held responsible. When negligence can be counted, "we didn't know" doesn't fly. They've got so much money invested in so much technology and legal effort, they've either got no cause to pretend ignorance or they're too incompetent to continue operating.
Anyway, people with dementia also serve to fill in the missing pieces by making things up ("confabulation" is the unnecessarily obtuse term for it), frequently accusing people of saying or doing things against them when in fact they had no such intention. Thus, people with dementia should also often mistake plain statements for sarcasm.
Humor, now, that one would be hard to mistake. You may not think it's funny, but you get it or you don't. No mistaking it being personally directed. Much better diagnostic IMO.
If everyone who ever had anything to do with Tamm (to the best of their admittedly human and therefore fallible memory can recall) got word to Agent Lawless that they might have something to contribute, said Lawless (Agent) might suddenly suffer an overabundance of leads to follow.
The fact that he (Tamm) apparently smuggled his sister out of a research hospital aboard a Firefly class ship would probably be at the extreme end of such reports. Most would probably be more plausible. "He told me he knew how to make free long distance calls." (Later - He said all I needed to do was call those that started with 800.)
Tamm might go down for this. The guy who did the same to the tobacco companies did too. But, they made a movie based on it ("The Insider") so people could know there was a story, and all the billions of dollars the tobacco companies paid to the states (most subsequentely wasted by the states) were a pay off they made before the statute of limitations expired and their true culpability became known. One day it will.
Hopefully Tamm will get picked up by a large enough concern to protect him. There are, after all, corporations that are large enough to deflect such puny attempts at law enforcement, whether questionable or not.
Only the First Reported
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Sleep Mailing
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I know for a fact the same has happened before, it just didn't get written up and submitted.
Many people sleepwalk and do things almost as if awake, except linguistics are often fractured. But not always. Once subject had an episode of 48 hours of amnesia, behaving normally but being cognitively anesthetized. He also had an episode of 24 hours of amnesia. The first was due to lorazepam and diphenhydramine, the second to Ambien*, compounded by a poorly functioning liver due to hep C and its treatment.
In both cases the subject posted to/., and as far as I can tell, none of you could tell I wasn't home any more than the cops who showed up at the 3 car accidents, examined me, and determined I wasn't impaired. (As a nod to those with whom I've had words, we'll add "at least not any more than normally.) Despite not being obviously impaired, and in fact perfectly lucid, eloquent and cheerfully compliant to all requests, the cops had me taken to the hospital after the 3rd since I'd rolled a van and totaled it. It was not showing any adverse physical or mental after effects that tipped them off that something strange was going on. I forgot to go into shock or even be distraught, and by the time I was at the ER forgot why I was there.
* Ambien advertises that a side effect is "sleepwalking with no memory of the event". Sleepwalking implies that. To state the second part explicitly means they're calling it sleepwalking when it's something else. Been there, done that, call it what it is - amnesia while conscious. Dissociation is also somewhat relevant, such as with ketamine, but behavior there tends to be abnormal, though not appearing intoxicated.
Well, once the CRT started to fade out towards the brand new LCD/TFT era, things moved pretty fast. I remember a classmate had this shiny new 15" TFT back in 98, and in the early 2000 anything other than a TFT was a bit old school.
Now, that was an object that you clearly get a win with (better sharpness for most part, thinner, better looking) but even if SSD's isn't visible right in front of you, techies will see the advantages once the price is right and switch to it. And techies builds computers for other users as well.
And beside that, laptops are being more and more popular all the time, and those are the ones really advantaging from SSD's.
Fade out? You haven't gotten a very good overview of what equipment is on desks. CRTs are still sold in large numbers. And they're replaced less often than CPUs. Many people do not see a significant advantage to flat panels; their CRT is still good enough. What may be called "old school" by some is called "mine" by far more. If new machines weren't packed with new monitors (more and more often flat panels) with a significant discount for the package, there'd be far fewer flat panels on desks. THAT is the primary way for 'techies' to force the switch -- many machines are bought (or not) and owned by individuals than by people tasked with making those decisions for them. Even so, those who really make the decisions hold the money, and if they can save a few percent from buying boxes only and making the workers keep their CRTS, they, can, will and do.
If "SSD is for laptops" is a valid argument, then "replacing CRTs with flat panels" is a valid argument for desktops. The latter does not hold. The former remains an assertion (actually here, a question) about the future. The parallel is based on human behavior, not specs. Specs don't buy equipment, humans do.
[From Slashwayback]: Dear Keypunch, I have data I want to keep for decades. Should I invest in a good card reader, or should I transfer my data to these far more efficient but newfangled "floppy disks"?
It's pretty ridiculous to expect one storage format to be viable for 'decades'. Not because it goes bad (even though it probably does), but because you're not likely to be able to maintain the necessary equipment for that long. If you find a storage solution, you need a retrieval solution to equal it. What equipment will you be able to find decades on that can access your storage, even if it stays good? You have no idea.
I've been maintaining a collection of Apple IIs and recopying the programs and data regularly (mostly through full HD backup, reformat with error block deletion, reformatting and replacing) to keep it readable. I have machines and data between 20 and 30 years old. I recognized long ago this had become a hobby in its own right, as most of what I had hasn't been of interest to me for many years. The little bits that have been useful have been transferred to newer machines and formats several times. That's decreased as more and more of it can be found easily on the web (previously FTP/gopher/etc.).
Get used to transferring your data to new formats as they come into widespread use, and recopying as necessary to keep them readable. Or else:
[From Slashwayforward] Dear Galactic EM Field Computing, I just found about 20 pounds of aluminized plastic disks that used to have data on them, but I can't read them to tell if I still want it. Is there any museum that might want these? Or are there still any operating plastic recycling centers that might give me a few bucks for them?
"the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options."
They are more polluting because they require constant replacement. Things that companies can make the most profit on are the things they'll sell. To sell them they'll make them as indispensable as possible and emphsize the start up/switching costs of the long term cheaper alternatives. And people will buy that line because they don't want their lives disrupted. When the effects of current methods become more inconvenient than switching and the discomfort of not knowing if they'll have to switch again, then people will switch. Probably not before. This holds for both individual switching and for population areas fed by a power monopoly. More so in the latter case because those often ensure their survival by investing in their own suppliers, such as coal burning companies owning interest in the railroads that carry the coal. With an incestuous relationship like that, you can only expect the power company to spread FUD so they don't lose money.
When the helical fluorescent tubes that screw into regular lamp sockets came out, they were a flop. They cost $15 to $20. Despite being longer lasting than the equivalent dollar amount of incandescent bulbs, people didn't see them as a significant improvement. In one study group, a subject gave a remark that summed up their reticence: "This solves a problem I don't have."
So it is with SSD. It'll have to be enough cheaper than magentic storage and appear to be long lived enough so that people can overcome their unwillingness to switch from something that works just fine. Specs don't matter to the average user. Not getting stuck with an orphan matters far more. That point remains unproven. Thus SSDs do not solve a problem, but present one of their own. If and when both of these change, they'll be accepted.
Does anybody know of similar, but with correctly stated units, details regarding monitors' use? I know flat panels are better over all, but there'd still be a difference. I know from working on TVs that most of the power still gets used as long as the CRT is on, no matter what's shown or not. The guns have to be ready to project an image should one occur -- the CRT can't guess how long nothing will be presented. I once heard figures for 'instant on' TVs when they were new that claimed 25% to 75% savings, depending on the manufacturer (despite similar technologies, so the figures go well with salt).
I do recall that screen savers saved nothing (per the author of the old Mac flying toaster screensaver, quoted in Forbes) in terms of power, and that with the advent of SVGA that unless a monitor stayed on constantly and showed the same screen most of the time, then they didn't even save screens from burn in.
If they're going to report science they should have people capable of evaluating the present scientific, or the equivalent technical uses, rather than simply rewriting press releases and thinly veiled advertising. I've used pretty much every available kind of electrode in both settings.
Screw in electrodes were old when I managed the EEG lab at Virginia Tech and had to decide what to buy and use, and to justify those decisions. They weren't used then, and aren't like to now, because they're not more convenient or accurate, and certainly less comfortable than other alternatives.
The oldest versions are water soluble glue-on. Most people who've had EEGs done at hospitals are familiar with picking that sticky stuff out of their hair. They needn't have done that, since washing your hair gets it out.
Newer versions include elastic caps, very much like swimming caps with the electrodes built in. Conduction is based on conductive gel without needing the glue. Newer still is the electrodes sewn together with elastic threads. All the electrodes go on at once, up to 256 of them. The conductive gel gets injected into the center of the electrodes, and has no problem with hair. Conduction and impedance still need to be checked and balanced between electrodes and within the impedance range of the amps.
Even newer are high impedance electrodes (and impedance matching amps) that require no conduction gel. The electrodes are embedded in small cups containing sponge, and the whole thing gets dipped in salt water prior to application.
The newest, most accurate and convenient EEG electrodes all go on at once using the elastic thread net attachment. They have the preamplifiers built into the electrode, so impedance matching (ie. accuracy) is not an issue.
I've used all of them, and have a personal record of 256 channels of accurate, impedance artifact free EEG, being recorded in less than 8 minutes from the time the person sat in the chair.
I've used screw-pin electrodes as well as straight-needle electrodes for intraoperative electrophysiology (but not EEG, but only because the other options were available and better). These are suitable when the person is under anesthesia. However, skin is elastic and can be torn. Using it as the basis for electrode attachment will result in some of them being torn off, particularly when the person moves. Some of the other methods result in the electrodes being so displaced, but at least they don't break the epidermis and leave a path for infection. Where the skin is thinnest -- the scalp -- the epidermis/dermis thickness is the least, making infection more likely. If initial electrode placement is not optimal, worst present case is having to dissolve the glue and reset the electrode. All other cases are simply done by moving it. If the electrodes in TFA are misplaced, you leave an infection prone hole when you remove it and use a new electrode in the correct spot. Screw- and straight-needle electrodes are used in surgery because they person is adequately cleansed and the ER is fairly free of infective agents.
When the scalp is injured and recording is required ASAP (by EMT or ER personnel), the whole head caps/nets place the electrodes properly, as they place them according to predetermined sites regardless of condition and displacement of the scalp and will help hold each other and the scalp in place. Placing individual electrodes will require in this instance the same sort of head measurement and individual placement based on the "10-20" system. This is very slow. If the skin shifts due to injury, there goes the electrode placement. If the skin is loose, there goes the electrode. When the procedure is one of deep electrode implantation, a net of electrodes will still be a far better choice, and the few electrodes that must be moved for the implant site are easily shifted out of the way.
Note that an apparent benefit to these would be in an EMT/ER situation when only a few electrodes are required. The caps/nets still go on faster, and are faster s
The primary visual cortex (V1) has already been shown to be retinotopic. What's being seen can be mapped directly from the cortex. It's crude and low-res, but it works.
20 years ago a researcher working with Karl Pribram at Radford University was able to detect signals from small cellular assemblies of the visual cortex that represented a particular shape being viewed without mapping the entire shape from V1.
In both these, the images were received directly from the brain. In both they were digitally processed and presented. In all three what was retrieved was not an image, but was a pattern of neural electrical activity that they had already determined represented a particular visual field. They could not (in keeping with the/. tendency to represent reality with fiction) for instance, retrieve the third frame of a series of images that had been briefly presesnted. They would have had to show the image for some time that record EEG from the appropriate areas for long enough that they could get a good correlation when showing it a second time.
Perhaps at the moment. We do not orbit in that plane. "In addition the Sun oscillates up and down relative to the galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way This is taken as evidence that we did not originally belong to this galaxy, but got trapped when our original galaxy got cannibalized by this one.
If the connotation is "discovered", as it seems in TFA, then TFA is wrong. If instead it implies the more accurate "providing additional data regarding that which is already known" then it'd be correct.
I can't reach his site now that it's on Discover Magazine's site; does Phil Plait ever take astronomers and/or "real" science media to task for doing and/or reporting bad astronomy? What TFA does provide is an improved estimate for the mass: 4 million suns vs. 2.6 million from the 2002 data.
Multiply the power generated by the many orders of magnitude that the elevator is longer than the tether was.
As the elevator swung through the magnetosphere on the aposol and perisol points of its rotation, it'd be generating billions of volts and conducting huge amounts of current down to the ground and out the top end of the elevator.
The ground equipment and probably a portion of the bottom of the elevator would be turned to plasma. Same at the other end. The rest of the structure would orbit free and crash. Enough of it would not be burned away that the remainder would wrap around the Earth several times.
Note that this scenario would require it be completely built before the effect started. This is, of course, impossible. It would be burning itself away as its length was increased. Note also that this is due to the structure only, not the dynamics of something going up and down it. Nothing would ever get the chance to make the trip.
It is at first obvious that generating power in this fashion would power the elevator. Less obvious but more important, is what to do with the 99.999% of the generated power that's surplus. It's just too much surplus, and we have no technology to carry that much power safely on such a structure.
Look at the details of the tether experiment. Less than 20 km of tether produced 3500 volts and burned the tether away from the shuttle. The elevator would be 4216 times longer. Also, the tether was not directly vertical, whereas the elevator would be. The amount of power generated would be more than the 4216 times the length.
A primary choice for the elevator structure is carbon fiber. When that stuff burns it puts out a cloud of random buckytube-like particles which pose a health hazard much like a cloud of equivalent mass of asbestos. The best choice of material for the structure would be pretty near the worst choice when it came to its inevitable self-destruction.
If the elevator burned away in the atmosphere, the carbon particulate would be a nasty pollutant. If the structure boiled itself away at higher altitude, outside the atmosphere, it would leave a trail of carbon particles that would become a hazard to spacecraft. Flying through that cloud would be like plowing into fine sand. A brief encounter would be very little trouble. But trying to fly at that same orbit for an extended time would erode away the spacecraft. If it were dense enough, it could also collect some charge in the manner of the tether, and discharge that into a spacecraft approaching it.
When asked why he came to "our planet", Klaatu responds incredulously "YOUR planet?"
That's the worst misspelling of "Keanu" I've ever seen, shame on you for disrespecting one of our finest actors.
I meant no disrespect. But had I taken better care with the spelling, I'd have said "Michael Rennie". Note that they waited until he was dead for 35 years before even approaching this remake. Worried Gort may have resurrected him again, no doubt.
No, seriously I think Keanu and the remake will both prove superior, and not just in terms of relevance (ecology vs. cold war contexts).
Canada has a proud heritage of this. One province forced the entire country to have to be effectively bilingual. Then when that province wanted to secede, the First Nations who owned the land that 2/3 of their hydroelectric power came from, regardless of actual population numbers, refused to go along, and stopped it cold. So I've no doubt this could actually go into practice in the Great White. I also have no doubt that nobody can require an artist to conduct their business from any given country without forceably restraining them. Canadian artists will simply produce elsewhere, leaving the ISPs to fork over 3% of what Serenity's staff theoretical mathematician Jayne Cobb described as "let's see, nuthin', plus nuthin', carry the nuthin'..."
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I don't know. I went to school in Las Cruces (NMSU) and Dona Ana county is pretty damn poor other than those associated with either the Uni or White Sands. At the time (~1994) they were just starting to talk about a space port. For them to be willing to take a chance on something like this through a self imposed sales tax increase is commendable. The at least partial funding from the local tax base will keep local oversight fairly high. Granted it is construction so by default its corrupt, but I've seen how the areas has transformed since the early 90s and its impressive. I think it has been money very well spent and as long as it totally doesn't fall through will be a huge boom economically for the area. They've probably doubled the number of Sonics and Weinerschniztles(sp?) in town since I was there and anyone can a test to that being the true measure for economic strength for a town in the southwest.
The local tax district isn't supposed to carry the place, it's just supposed to show willingness of the locals, and later when there's significant tourist travel, THEN they'll be able to contribute more. For now it was enough to get it started so NM would fund the majority of the construction. It's a speculative investment by the state, which hopes to see returns if things work out.
I'm I missing something or does this spaceport not actually connect to anything? Ironically you would be travelling the most distance in your life and end not going anywhere. Anyway, hope this will bring actual space travel to the moon, planets, I would even settle for a station on Earth orbit, closer to most people.
You're not wrong. Just like SS1, SS2/Virgin Galactic is strictly an up-and-down same place ride. SS2 is not capable of an orbital trajectory or even significant gliding distance, by design. SS3 is intended to be orbital. Then we'll be going places.
One giant leap at a time.
"He claims he needed to do this because he was unable to track them down to a physical address."
He's not necessarily supposed to be able to. That what they hire investigators for, and process servers to deliver them. My money says he just wanted to keep as much of his money as he could.
The usual excuses will now be compounded with the excuses familiar to anyone who's been on line for long: "I downloaded it with my email, but it got corrupted." "My hard drive crashed" "Someone hacked into my computer/account and" [deleted it/I thought they faked it/they put that page up, that was never me to begin with/etc.] "I haven't used that account for X amount of time" "My hard drive crashed" (yes, that gets used enough to bear repeating) "You must have sent it to the wrong account because I never saw it" "It was in some format I couldn't read; I only use FooBar format".
Anyone who really wants to avoid it will make sure one or more of those are true when it comes to telling the court why they didn't respond, and very few will be available that will be able to prove otherwise.
Forget diving for it individually. Let OSF collect and collate, and task someone at /. with gathering and posting a weekly summary. It'd certainly serve a better purpose than "Ignore Mail". It'd bolster OSF's effort because, get serious now, which is going to be read more?
Lorenz 'discovered' chaos when he found non-linear, self-similar but non-replicating, and increasingly unpredictable results coming from a set of three interdependent (each variable was a term in the other two) recursive LINEAR equations.
You've got humans in this equation. They are not only not linear, they're not even rational.
The "beauty" in John Nash's "A Beautiful Mind" is best typified early in the movie when he tells his fellows that if everyone goes after the brunettes, they'll all get laid, but if any one of the goes after the blond, none of them will. That became the essence of his most famous works in game theory. Granted "This man is a genius." (the sum total of the recommendation letter his Carnegie mentor penned to Princeton), but through many trials and errors you'd expect others to come to similar results, knowingly or not. But NOOOO everyone wants the blond, even though the intended result is not affected by hair color. The decision making process if very often not controlled by the frontal lobes.
I'm speaking from history, metaphor and a male perspective here. I don't defend it, nor do I hold up for contempt. It's just that I can only speak from the male perspective. I suspect females have equally irrational perspectives they can speak from (though they may be more likely to have more sense than to do so).
CAN-SPAM like many other laws (can anyone say PATRIOT?) was written and passed for the benefit of voters and those they vote for. Very few cases of enforcement were actual attempts to enforce the law, most were attempts to fill press releases.
As I've quoted before, FTC Commissioner Orson Swindell said at the first FTC spam conference "What we need are a few good old fashioned hangings." Certainly in spirit, yes. If the Secret Service can round of a few dozen kids and a game designer and cause them all manner of grief, now that they know what they're doing, why can't they round up a few dozen spammers? Why do the "spam kings" get removed only to be replaced with no net (pun unintentional, but I like it) effect?
Isn't there an "or cause to" statement in the law? Those that hire spammers were supposed to be held accountable too. "I didn't know they would spam it" should only be taken to mean the owner was negligent in research and contract. Negligence isn't commission, but it's still a basis for guilt.
Spamming has become such a big multinational business, and increasingly associated with organized crime, it's only a matter of time before we start hearing about them offing each other and/or their providers. That's hearing about it, not to say it hasn't happened already and not recognized.
"The stock of Ichi Ban Tuna Ice Cream hit a new high following analysis of data from their eye-tracking billboards, showing dozens of people were looking at them for extended periods. Substantial investment was made in creating more manufacturing and distribution facilities. However, the stock then plummeted when it was found that the data represented dozens of Hello Kitty dolls being propped up in front of many of the billboards. The earlier investment was written off as a corporate loss. The corporate officers are said to be re-evaluating use of the technology. Hello Kitty had no comment."
Social solutions are the best solutions to technical problems, because you can't work around society, something most technical people aren't trained to grasp.
They use the law to suit them and ignore it when that suits them, hoping to get away with questionable tactics in both cases.
It's time to seize the whole outfit, and their "hired" investigation company (my money says it's a spin off, or has been bought in majority after the fact), determine how much of what they're doing illegally they knew was illegal, prosecute, dissolve, and distribute the sold assets among the victims.
And the 'subscriber' companies (ie. those who formed and own the RIAA) shouldn't get off free either. Corporation as artificial entities serve to protect its members from direct prosecution. Fine. Put the artificial entity in artificial jail (receivership), force the subscribers to maintain their relationship, and let them suffer the consequences proportionally to the extent they 'subscribe'.
When the law says "or caused to" second parties can be held responsible. When negligence can be counted, "we didn't know" doesn't fly. They've got so much money invested in so much technology and legal effort, they've either got no cause to pretend ignorance or they're too incompetent to continue operating.
Or are you just pulling my leg?
Anyway, people with dementia also serve to fill in the missing pieces by making things up ("confabulation" is the unnecessarily obtuse term for it), frequently accusing people of saying or doing things against them when in fact they had no such intention. Thus, people with dementia should also often mistake plain statements for sarcasm.
Humor, now, that one would be hard to mistake. You may not think it's funny, but you get it or you don't. No mistaking it being personally directed. Much better diagnostic IMO.
If everyone who ever had anything to do with Tamm (to the best of their admittedly human and therefore fallible memory can recall) got word to Agent Lawless that they might have something to contribute, said Lawless (Agent) might suddenly suffer an overabundance of leads to follow.
The fact that he (Tamm) apparently smuggled his sister out of a research hospital aboard a Firefly class ship would probably be at the extreme end of such reports. Most would probably be more plausible. "He told me he knew how to make free long distance calls." (Later - He said all I needed to do was call those that started with 800.)
Tamm might go down for this. The guy who did the same to the tobacco companies did too. But, they made a movie based on it ("The Insider") so people could know there was a story, and all the billions of dollars the tobacco companies paid to the states (most subsequentely wasted by the states) were a pay off they made before the statute of limitations expired and their true culpability became known. One day it will.
Hopefully Tamm will get picked up by a large enough concern to protect him. There are, after all, corporations that are large enough to deflect such puny attempts at law enforcement, whether questionable or not.
I know for a fact the same has happened before, it just didn't get written up and submitted.
Many people sleepwalk and do things almost as if awake, except linguistics are often fractured. But not always. Once subject had an episode of 48 hours of amnesia, behaving normally but being cognitively anesthetized. He also had an episode of 24 hours of amnesia. The first was due to lorazepam and diphenhydramine, the second to Ambien*, compounded by a poorly functioning liver due to hep C and its treatment.
In both cases the subject posted to /., and as far as I can tell, none of you could tell I wasn't home any more than the cops who showed up at the 3 car accidents, examined me, and determined I wasn't impaired. (As a nod to those with whom I've had words, we'll add "at least not any more than normally.) Despite not being obviously impaired, and in fact perfectly lucid, eloquent and cheerfully compliant to all requests, the cops had me taken to the hospital after the 3rd since I'd rolled a van and totaled it. It was not showing any adverse physical or mental after effects that tipped them off that something strange was going on. I forgot to go into shock or even be distraught, and by the time I was at the ER forgot why I was there.
* Ambien advertises that a side effect is "sleepwalking with no memory of the event". Sleepwalking implies that. To state the second part explicitly means they're calling it sleepwalking when it's something else. Been there, done that, call it what it is - amnesia while conscious. Dissociation is also somewhat relevant, such as with ketamine, but behavior there tends to be abnormal, though not appearing intoxicated.
Well, once the CRT started to fade out towards the brand new LCD/TFT era, things moved pretty fast. I remember a classmate had this shiny new 15" TFT back in 98, and in the early 2000 anything other than a TFT was a bit old school.
Now, that was an object that you clearly get a win with (better sharpness for most part, thinner, better looking) but even if SSD's isn't visible right in front of you, techies will see the advantages once the price is right and switch to it. And techies builds computers for other users as well.
And beside that, laptops are being more and more popular all the time, and those are the ones really advantaging from SSD's.
Fade out? You haven't gotten a very good overview of what equipment is on desks. CRTs are still sold in large numbers. And they're replaced less often than CPUs. Many people do not see a significant advantage to flat panels; their CRT is still good enough. What may be called "old school" by some is called "mine" by far more. If new machines weren't packed with new monitors (more and more often flat panels) with a significant discount for the package, there'd be far fewer flat panels on desks. THAT is the primary way for 'techies' to force the switch -- many machines are bought (or not) and owned by individuals than by people tasked with making those decisions for them. Even so, those who really make the decisions hold the money, and if they can save a few percent from buying boxes only and making the workers keep their CRTS, they, can, will and do.
If "SSD is for laptops" is a valid argument, then "replacing CRTs with flat panels" is a valid argument for desktops. The latter does not hold. The former remains an assertion (actually here, a question) about the future. The parallel is based on human behavior, not specs. Specs don't buy equipment, humans do.
[From Slashwayback]: Dear Keypunch, I have data I want to keep for decades. Should I invest in a good card reader, or should I transfer my data to these far more efficient but newfangled "floppy disks"?
It's pretty ridiculous to expect one storage format to be viable for 'decades'. Not because it goes bad (even though it probably does), but because you're not likely to be able to maintain the necessary equipment for that long. If you find a storage solution, you need a retrieval solution to equal it. What equipment will you be able to find decades on that can access your storage, even if it stays good? You have no idea.
I've been maintaining a collection of Apple IIs and recopying the programs and data regularly (mostly through full HD backup, reformat with error block deletion, reformatting and replacing) to keep it readable. I have machines and data between 20 and 30 years old. I recognized long ago this had become a hobby in its own right, as most of what I had hasn't been of interest to me for many years. The little bits that have been useful have been transferred to newer machines and formats several times. That's decreased as more and more of it can be found easily on the web (previously FTP/gopher/etc.).
Get used to transferring your data to new formats as they come into widespread use, and recopying as necessary to keep them readable. Or else:
[From Slashwayforward] Dear Galactic EM Field Computing, I just found about 20 pounds of aluminized plastic disks that used to have data on them, but I can't read them to tell if I still want it. Is there any museum that might want these? Or are there still any operating plastic recycling centers that might give me a few bucks for them?
"the options that are getting the most attention are between 25 to 1,000 times more polluting than the best available options."
They are more polluting because they require constant replacement. Things that companies can make the most profit on are the things they'll sell. To sell them they'll make them as indispensable as possible and emphsize the start up/switching costs of the long term cheaper alternatives. And people will buy that line because they don't want their lives disrupted. When the effects of current methods become more inconvenient than switching and the discomfort of not knowing if they'll have to switch again, then people will switch. Probably not before. This holds for both individual switching and for population areas fed by a power monopoly. More so in the latter case because those often ensure their survival by investing in their own suppliers, such as coal burning companies owning interest in the railroads that carry the coal. With an incestuous relationship like that, you can only expect the power company to spread FUD so they don't lose money.
When the helical fluorescent tubes that screw into regular lamp sockets came out, they were a flop. They cost $15 to $20. Despite being longer lasting than the equivalent dollar amount of incandescent bulbs, people didn't see them as a significant improvement. In one study group, a subject gave a remark that summed up their reticence: "This solves a problem I don't have."
So it is with SSD. It'll have to be enough cheaper than magentic storage and appear to be long lived enough so that people can overcome their unwillingness to switch from something that works just fine. Specs don't matter to the average user. Not getting stuck with an orphan matters far more. That point remains unproven. Thus SSDs do not solve a problem, but present one of their own. If and when both of these change, they'll be accepted.
Does anybody know of similar, but with correctly stated units, details regarding monitors' use? I know flat panels are better over all, but there'd still be a difference. I know from working on TVs that most of the power still gets used as long as the CRT is on, no matter what's shown or not. The guns have to be ready to project an image should one occur -- the CRT can't guess how long nothing will be presented. I once heard figures for 'instant on' TVs when they were new that claimed 25% to 75% savings, depending on the manufacturer (despite similar technologies, so the figures go well with salt).
I do recall that screen savers saved nothing (per the author of the old Mac flying toaster screensaver, quoted in Forbes) in terms of power, and that with the advent of SVGA that unless a monitor stayed on constantly and showed the same screen most of the time, then they didn't even save screens from burn in.
If they're going to report science they should have people capable of evaluating the present scientific, or the equivalent technical uses, rather than simply rewriting press releases and thinly veiled advertising. I've used pretty much every available kind of electrode in both settings.
Screw in electrodes were old when I managed the EEG lab at Virginia Tech and had to decide what to buy and use, and to justify those decisions. They weren't used then, and aren't like to now, because they're not more convenient or accurate, and certainly less comfortable than other alternatives.
The oldest versions are water soluble glue-on. Most people who've had EEGs done at hospitals are familiar with picking that sticky stuff out of their hair. They needn't have done that, since washing your hair gets it out.
Newer versions include elastic caps, very much like swimming caps with the electrodes built in. Conduction is based on conductive gel without needing the glue. Newer still is the electrodes sewn together with elastic threads. All the electrodes go on at once, up to 256 of them. The conductive gel gets injected into the center of the electrodes, and has no problem with hair. Conduction and impedance still need to be checked and balanced between electrodes and within the impedance range of the amps.
Even newer are high impedance electrodes (and impedance matching amps) that require no conduction gel. The electrodes are embedded in small cups containing sponge, and the whole thing gets dipped in salt water prior to application.
The newest, most accurate and convenient EEG electrodes all go on at once using the elastic thread net attachment. They have the preamplifiers built into the electrode, so impedance matching (ie. accuracy) is not an issue.
I've used all of them, and have a personal record of 256 channels of accurate, impedance artifact free EEG, being recorded in less than 8 minutes from the time the person sat in the chair.
I've used screw-pin electrodes as well as straight-needle electrodes for intraoperative electrophysiology (but not EEG, but only because the other options were available and better). These are suitable when the person is under anesthesia. However, skin is elastic and can be torn. Using it as the basis for electrode attachment will result in some of them being torn off, particularly when the person moves. Some of the other methods result in the electrodes being so displaced, but at least they don't break the epidermis and leave a path for infection. Where the skin is thinnest -- the scalp -- the epidermis/dermis thickness is the least, making infection more likely. If initial electrode placement is not optimal, worst present case is having to dissolve the glue and reset the electrode. All other cases are simply done by moving it. If the electrodes in TFA are misplaced, you leave an infection prone hole when you remove it and use a new electrode in the correct spot. Screw- and straight-needle electrodes are used in surgery because they person is adequately cleansed and the ER is fairly free of infective agents.
When the scalp is injured and recording is required ASAP (by EMT or ER personnel), the whole head caps/nets place the electrodes properly, as they place them according to predetermined sites regardless of condition and displacement of the scalp and will help hold each other and the scalp in place. Placing individual electrodes will require in this instance the same sort of head measurement and individual placement based on the "10-20" system. This is very slow. If the skin shifts due to injury, there goes the electrode placement. If the skin is loose, there goes the electrode. When the procedure is one of deep electrode implantation, a net of electrodes will still be a far better choice, and the few electrodes that must be moved for the implant site are easily shifted out of the way.
Note that an apparent benefit to these would be in an EMT/ER situation when only a few electrodes are required. The caps/nets still go on faster, and are faster s
The primary visual cortex (V1) has already been shown to be retinotopic. What's being seen can be mapped directly from the cortex. It's crude and low-res, but it works.
20 years ago a researcher working with Karl Pribram at Radford University was able to detect signals from small cellular assemblies of the visual cortex that represented a particular shape being viewed without mapping the entire shape from V1.
In both these, the images were received directly from the brain. In both they were digitally processed and presented. In all three what was retrieved was not an image, but was a pattern of neural electrical activity that they had already determined represented a particular visual field. They could not (in keeping with the /. tendency to represent reality with fiction) for instance, retrieve the third frame of a series of images that had been briefly presesnted. They would have had to show the image for some time that record EEG from the appropriate areas for long enough that they could get a good correlation when showing it a second time.
Are we on the same plane as the accretion disk?
Yes.
Perhaps at the moment. We do not orbit in that plane. "In addition the Sun oscillates up and down relative to the galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milky_Way This is taken as evidence that we did not originally belong to this galaxy, but got trapped when our original galaxy got cannibalized by this one.
If the connotation is "discovered", as it seems in TFA, then TFA is wrong. If instead it implies the more accurate "providing additional data regarding that which is already known" then it'd be correct.
"Final Proof Provided For Milky Ways Central Black Hole", Space.com, 16 October 2002. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/blackhole_milkyway_021016.html
I can't reach his site now that it's on Discover Magazine's site; does Phil Plait ever take astronomers and/or "real" science media to task for doing and/or reporting bad astronomy? What TFA does provide is an improved estimate for the mass: 4 million suns vs. 2.6 million from the 2002 data.
"...There's nothing to be gained down that path other than possibly to expand the wallets of a few companies."
That's precisely the reason the government would back it. Governments have created corporations and have conducted wars for exactly that reason.
Start with the space shuttle's tethered power generation experiments: http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/wtether.htm
Multiply the power generated by the many orders of magnitude that the elevator is longer than the tether was.
As the elevator swung through the magnetosphere on the aposol and perisol points of its rotation, it'd be generating billions of volts and conducting huge amounts of current down to the ground and out the top end of the elevator.
The ground equipment and probably a portion of the bottom of the elevator would be turned to plasma. Same at the other end. The rest of the structure would orbit free and crash. Enough of it would not be burned away that the remainder would wrap around the Earth several times.
Note that this scenario would require it be completely built before the effect started. This is, of course, impossible. It would be burning itself away as its length was increased. Note also that this is due to the structure only, not the dynamics of something going up and down it. Nothing would ever get the chance to make the trip.
It is at first obvious that generating power in this fashion would power the elevator. Less obvious but more important, is what to do with the 99.999% of the generated power that's surplus. It's just too much surplus, and we have no technology to carry that much power safely on such a structure.
Look at the details of the tether experiment. Less than 20 km of tether produced 3500 volts and burned the tether away from the shuttle. The elevator would be 4216 times longer. Also, the tether was not directly vertical, whereas the elevator would be. The amount of power generated would be more than the 4216 times the length.
A primary choice for the elevator structure is carbon fiber. When that stuff burns it puts out a cloud of random buckytube-like particles which pose a health hazard much like a cloud of equivalent mass of asbestos. The best choice of material for the structure would be pretty near the worst choice when it came to its inevitable self-destruction.
If the elevator burned away in the atmosphere, the carbon particulate would be a nasty pollutant. If the structure boiled itself away at higher altitude, outside the atmosphere, it would leave a trail of carbon particles that would become a hazard to spacecraft. Flying through that cloud would be like plowing into fine sand. A brief encounter would be very little trouble. But trying to fly at that same orbit for an extended time would erode away the spacecraft. If it were dense enough, it could also collect some charge in the manner of the tether, and discharge that into a spacecraft approaching it.
That's the worst misspelling of "Keanu" I've ever seen, shame on you for disrespecting one of our finest actors.
I meant no disrespect. But had I taken better care with the spelling, I'd have said "Michael Rennie". Note that they waited until he was dead for 35 years before even approaching this remake. Worried Gort may have resurrected him again, no doubt.
No, seriously I think Keanu and the remake will both prove superior, and not just in terms of relevance (ecology vs. cold war contexts).
Just FYI, the conductor is Clive Wearing, and it was caused by Herpes Encephalitis rather than whiplash.
Thanks for the correction. The memory of the movie is 20 years old. It was probably another case in that same movie that was whiplash.
Canada has a proud heritage of this. One province forced the entire country to have to be effectively bilingual. Then when that province wanted to secede, the First Nations who owned the land that 2/3 of their hydroelectric power came from, regardless of actual population numbers, refused to go along, and stopped it cold. So I've no doubt this could actually go into practice in the Great White. I also have no doubt that nobody can require an artist to conduct their business from any given country without forceably restraining them. Canadian artists will simply produce elsewhere, leaving the ISPs to fork over 3% of what Serenity's staff theoretical mathematician Jayne Cobb described as "let's see, nuthin', plus nuthin', carry the nuthin'..."